Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

At least one person can no longer be conned

My 13.5 year old glanced at this article and then walked away. I asked, “Aren’t you going to read it?” She shrugged. “It just says that global warming’s basically a fraud. I already knew that. We need to care for our environment, but the world isn’t coming to an end.” That’s my girl!

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I think I took abc too literally based on abc’s reply. I thought abc meant the scientific community would “let me” continue to think non-approved thoughts. And state them!

Actually abc was just being rhetorical (I think), when he said the scientific world.

I think he just meant, by “scientific world”, everyone who is rational, such as him, and not ignorant fools, such as those commenting in this Book room.

So I withdraw my unfortunate “freak comment”. I think I completely misunderstood. I thought abc actually felt that a scientist/government power should actually control what I can say. My misunderstanding – his comment was really nothing more than a mild insult.

Charles Martel

Mike, I visited Scientific World once. I had to save up for years to afford the ticket.

It was wondrous! On Theory Street I encountered great cartoon characters dressed up as Galileo, Newton, Fleming, Eisntein, Salk and Al Gore (I’m kidding about that last one!). It was really neat that they had a guy dressed in a chasuble and miter running down the street after Galileo pretending to flog him with a humongous cat-o-nine-tails that had little Sarah Palin portraits mounted on the business ends. Whatta hoot!

On Falsifiable Lane, I ran into characters dressed as Piltdown Man, Mr. String Theory, Electromagnetic Threat, and Global Cooling Girl, who all represented modern science’s uncanny ability to catch and reject untenable theories after only a few decades!

Atheist Avenue was kind of a bummer. The characters were dressed up as Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and the usual assortment of great minds that reasoned about God at a junior high school level. Boring! They had the same guy with the miter and chasuble chasing after them, but nobody laughed because the “joke” had become so lame.

Maybe the best part of my trip was the visit to The Congress of Scientists, where the world’s finest minds deliberated on who would be allowed to live and die in the utopia that they were creating. Sad to say, fetuses, blacks, Republicans, terminal patients and people who believe in God were on their list for elimination. “Once those fools are gone,” said the head scientist, a guy who called himself def, “We’ll probably be pretty much where we want to be, and only need to peridocially off a few million here or a few million there, just to keep the Ignoramuses at bay.”

Looking back, I think next time I’ll just go to Legoland.

http://bookwormroom.com Bookworm

I’m still laughing, Charles.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

I’m claiming Z’s methodology has holes and weaknesses in it. Z is the one stuck on NOAA, but that’s only one example, it is Z’s methodology that is more important to consider.

Mike Devx

Do you mean Z’s slavish devotion to consensus, Ymar? Or are you more subtly referring to the stilted tone and word choice of the propaganda? The selective examples chosen to bolster the one-sided argument?

Charles M @ 52: Great one, Charles!
Hey, you forget to mention the Consensus Carousel! *Everyone* at Scientific World is required to ride the Consensus Carousel!

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

Devx,

Z makes claims like “the NOAA links provided empirical claims…”.
Even though it is the Z that is the originator of the argument (the one claiming things here), and not NOAA, Z wants to shove the responsibility of primary advocacy unto his source. It’s a completely reverse ended methodology. Instead of quoting George W. Bush on WMDs and making an argument off the source, he instead replaces his own thoughts with Bush’s opinion and thoughts acting as a surrogate, eventually presenting it as Z’s primary argument. As if it came from Z himself. But it didn’t.

Charles Martel

“Consensus Carousel?” Love it, Mike!

Mike Devx

That is interesting. I usually provide a summary idea, then the link, and THEN my argumentation. Z will always provide the link at the very end of Z’s argument of a point. It does shove the “responsibility for primary advocacy unto his source”, as you say.

This is not “advocacy,” but an empirically verifiable scientific finding. NOAA provides authoritative support for the claim. For those interested in the technical details, there is a link at the bottom of the NOAA page that leads to the studies published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Mike Devx

Charles Martel @ 52 : Mike, I visited Scientific World once. I had to save up for years to afford the ticket.

There was this other fellow who visited Scientific World recently too, Charles. But he walked up to the admissions counter wearing his “Phil Jones Of The IPCC” t-shirt. Kind of like a Che Guevara T-Shirt, but nerdy. The lady at the counter complimented his shirt, and he then said, “Phil Jones is a GOD! He’s the most bestest, awesomest scientist who has ever walked the earth!”

“For you, the admission is only ten dollars,” the lady said, returning all the rest of his money.

The t-shirt was reversible. Once through the gate and inside, he turned the t-shirt inside out, to display the “No-Bama 2012″ image. He got a lot of dirty looks while walking down the midway. A group of seven clones even came up to him and one of them said, “There is a widespread consensus that President Obama will be re-elected in 2012,” and then tried to show him a supporting link on an I-Phone.

Charles Martel

A group of seven clones even came up to him and one of them said, “There is a widespread consensus that President Obama will be re-elected in 2012,” and then tried to show him a supporting link on an I-Phone.

ROFL!

Charles Martel

Mike, you have hit on Z’s weakest spot, namely, his reluctance (inability, really) to discuss topics where he does not have a bundle of talking points and links mapped out in advance.

He’s scared silly of discussions that veer into philosophy or epistemology because he’d be at sea trying to reason at that level of abstraction. He presents tautologies as moral reasoning—very much like abc—but knows that he cannot explain or defend them. Thus his total absence from any thread that requires independent thought or speculation. (A small mercy, I suppose.)

Mike Devx

Poor Z, still sticking doggedly to his guns.

Does Z ever lie awake, in the deepest dark of the night, troubled… remembering that not one scientific advancement was ever made by a member of the consensus doggedly agreeing with that consensus?

That every advancement was made by wondering about that strange anomaly in the data, refusing to let it go, following through, despite the heresy of departing from the consensus?

This thread concerns the claim that “global warming’s basically a fraud.” Hence, a discussion of the scientific support for global warming is part of that discussion. More specificially, empirically verifiable scientific findings are essential to understanding the scientific support. We stated several such important and relevant scientific findings. That simple first step was confused with advocacy. Then, you diverted into personal attacks.

Zach, it is not a personal attack to note your reluctance to state how you’ve arrived at your political and moral conclusions. I simply agreed with Mike that when it comes to such discussions you are truly a duck out of water and very much afraid to expose your lack of a well thought-out moral basis for your thoughts.

Please remember that you do not control the thread. We can talk about anything we want, including your philosophical incoherence.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

Martel, he’s worried that people will talk too much and emit pollutants (CO2) into the atmosphere that will cause “unsustainable development” of the human species.

Charles Martel: Please remember that you do not control the thread. We can talk about anything we want, including your philosophical incoherence.

Feel free to divert to what you consider our “philosophical incoherence” on a thread about global warming. We will continue to point to empirically verificable scientific findings concerning the actual topic.

Charles Martel

Zach, you remind me of a bagger at our local supermarket. He is a nice enough fellow, but extremely limited when it comes to human interaction. I think he probably has a form of mild autism. He knows he has to say certain things and act certain ways, but cannot really tell you why.

You are much the same. You claim to be concerned about AGW and its bad effects on humans—whom you refer to as though they are not the same species as you—but you never say why. Nobody here believes that you really like people or stand for any sort of moral enterprise. Your schtick carefully avoids any such discussion, because, as shown here time and time again, you are not equipped for it.

So, please, continue to bombard us with your regurgitated factoids. If you want to function as this blog’s Bourbons, who learn nothing and forget nothing, be our guest.

Martel out.

Mike Devx

Charles, don’t be too hard on the Z-Team.

They have a set of links for AGW that they consider conclusive, and they will keep repeating those same links ad nauseum, with a little boilerplate of “confirmation” advocacy.

Mike Devx: They have a set of links for AGW that they consider conclusive, and they will keep repeating those same links ad nauseum, with a little boilerplate of “confirmation” advocacy.

You’re still confused. We were substantiating particular facts. Those facts do not in themselves show the relationship between human activity and climate change. But it’s important to start with facts, even if others ignore those facts, or deny those facts, or compare the presenter of those facts to someone with mild autism (as if that impacts the fact one iota).

abc

Correction to #41: one side has facts AND scientific consensus. The other side has limitless doubt, which is beginning to look increasingly like irrational denial. Inaction is action, and the skeptics ought to supply their own affirmative case, with empirical evidence, to support that course of action.

Gringo, now that I understand what you were asking with STEM, I’d like to respond. As I have consistently said, I am not a climate scientists, so I rely on their expertise as a lay person. I don’t presume to know more than they do, nor do I blindly call them frauds because I don’t like what they are concluding. I trust their conclusions, just as I trust other scientists and technically trained people in their professional judgments, especially when I’ve received the first, second, third and fourth opinion on the matter with remarkable consistency. I think you do the same, except in the area of AGW, where you curiously hold out a different standard, although you are likely not qualified to evaluate the science–only the conclusion and implication of the science. And since you do not like that, you make the irrational exception to your normal treatment of scientific or highly technical data. This is bad since the scientists know better than you, or Book, or Mike, or Z, or myself. The irrationality is not listening to the expert because you are afraid of what you’ll have to do with the conclusions…or rather, what your grandkids will have to do. Denial. Selfishness. Ignorance. Are there any other rational explanations for the inconsistent use of scientific knowledge?? I can’t think of any, but perhaps you or others could fill me in. Also, it’d be nice if you could present an affirmative case for doing nothing, complete with empirical data found in peer reviewed (and thus double checked) journals. I’ll be waiting.

Gringo

abcGringo, now that I understand what you were asking with STEM, I’d like to respond.

But not by directly replying to my original query in #15:Please inform us about your STEM background. Rather similar to that of The Won and the Goreacle, I would suspect.

You ignored the K.I.S.S. Principle. A sentence or two would have sufficed, such as “I took a Physics for Poets class my freshman year.” Yet in the 250+ words you wrote in “reply,” you in no way answered my query. This leads me to the conclusion – as I surmised in my comment # 40- that your STEM background is approximately equivalent to ∅. Nichevo. Cero. Zilch. Zero. Maybe a Science for Poets course, like one the Goreacle took at Haavaad.

[I first used “∅” in math class in the 9th grade. And as we had to write a lot of proofs in 9th grade, I had extensive exposure to ∅ in 9th grade.]

Yet someone with nil or close to nil background in STEM has the chutzpah to call someone “scientifically illiterate.” Chutzpah, indeed. [comment #8] And then has the chutzpah to write some 250 words on an issue related to science.

I see no point in responding to anything further you have written in #73 as you have in no way linked it to anything I have written.

abc

Gringo,

More information is better…unless you want to declare a fake victory and retreat. As I wrote where you refused to read, I never claimed to be an expert in climate research, just as I am not a medical expert. However, I treat experts in both fields the same way, unlike the skeptics here, who are curiously hypocritical in their use of scientific expertise. And you guys continue to dance around or avoid the hypocrisy since you don’t have a good answer for it. I think that is the reason you wrote that there is “no point in responding to anything further…” Denial. Ignorance. Selfishness (because, unlike ignoring the doctor, calling the climate expert a charlatan will only hurt your grandkids). Thanks for proving my point. Better luck next time with attempting to change the subject to irrelevancies.

Charles Martel

Gringo, I’ll translate: abc, who gets caught with his pants down often, got caught with his pants down when he couldn’t figure out what you meant by STEM and was too lazy to even Google it.

And, yes, it’s obvious that much of what he says here is based on half-remembered frosh survey courses at Hahvahd.

(PS: I do these translations as a courtesy to abc, who is notoriously tight with his purse.)

Mike Devx

abc says: More information is better…unless you want to declare a fake victory and retreat.

Battles and wars! Advances and retreats! Victories and defeats!
This intense approach to Book’s comment areas explains the 500+ word missives.
You really are on a mission, aren’t you?

Well, whatever floats your boat.

Gringo

abcAnd you guys continue to dance around or avoid the hypocrisy since you don’t have a good answer for it. I think that is the reason you wrote that there is “no point in responding to anything further…” Denial. Ignorance. Selfishness.

You apparently have reading comprehension issues, so I will repeat in full what I had previously written:I see no point in responding to anything further you have written in #73 as you have in no way linked it to anything I have written.
La segunda : as you have in no way linked it to anything I have written.
Third time’s a charm: as you have in no way linked it to anything I have written.

Since in #73 and #76 you are making claims about what I have said but have no documentation whatsoever to actually prove I wrote what you claimed I wrote, it is a waste of time to discuss with you. For example, were I to state, “William Jehosephat Slobbinskojanovich sent a million dollars to Saddam Hussein in 2002,” but have no documentation to back up my claim, I am writing nonsense. As you are writing nonsense when you make claims about what I have written but have no documentation whatsoever that I actually stated that.

abcBetter luck next time with attempting to change the subject to irrelevancies.
The ONLY subject I have been discussing in this thread is related to what you originally wrote in #8-(This is how falsehoods are perpetuated from mother to daughter. It is why there are so many scientifically illiterate people out there.) and my response to it in #15:(Please inform us about your STEM background. Rather similar to that of The Won and the Goreacle, I would suspect.)
As indications are that you have zilch or close to zilch STEM background, your calling someone “scientifically illiterate” is rather comical. Someone who has zero or next to zero STEM background has no credibility whatsoever when he calls someone else “scientifically illiterate.”

That is the only issue I am discussing on this thread. To therefore accuse me of “attempting to change the subject” is comical.

IN #73 you tried to change the goalposts from my original point: someone with zero or next to zero STEM background has no credibility whatsoever when he calls someone else “scientifically illiterate.” And that is being charitable. I could say much harsher.